On Tuesday, 5-year-old Rebekah Sullivan sat under a perfect blue sky outside her grief-stuck North Carolina home.
“Where are the clouds?”’ she asked her mother’s cousin, Vanessa Krunich.
“Oh, no clouds today,” Krunich remembers replying. “It’s such a beautiful day.”
“I see my daddy in the clouds and he smiles at me,” Rebekah said.
Daddy was highly decorated Marine Master Sgt. Andrew “Sully” Sullivan, who retired on Sept. 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of 9/11. He was 42 and had survived a dozen deployments during two decades of our longest wars only to encounter his toughest foe in the form of COVID-19. His wife, Julie Sullivan, was still hopeful he would survive when The Daily Beast reported on his fight in late March. The Beast also reported that little Rebekah had overcome her fear of needles and gotten the jab after she was told that everyone around her father would have to be vaccinated when he came home from the hospital.
Sully was himself fully vaccinated and boostered, but doctors say exposure to toxins from military burn pits compromised his lungs and left them vulnerable to the virus, which proceeded to trash them. He died on April 7 after a month-long struggle to become fit enough for a double transplant. Rebekah was left gazing heavenward for her father.
A cloudless Tuesday in Jacksonville, N.C., was followed by a clear night, and Rebekah was able to make out the stars that comprise Orion’s Belt.
“Look, there’s my daddy’s smile,” Rebekah said. “Those three stars right there.”
“Yep, it sure is,” Krunich said.
On Thursday, Julie took Rebekah to the Jones Funeral Home in Jacksonville to see her father’s earthly remains. The girl stepped alone up to the shining black open casket with a red rose she had brought from one of the flower baskets that had arrived at their home. She had on a dark blue dress and lighter blue leggings, the single braid down her back tied with a baby blue bow. She was just tall enough to set her chin on the casket’s edge and gaze down at him.
A Marine Corps emblem was affixed to the inside of the coffin lid, but Sully was not in uniform. That would have necessitated shaving the “retirement beard” he had been able to grow after leaving the Marine Corps, having enlisted at 17 and then serving for 23 years and eight months. He was instead dressed in the dark suit he wore to church, a Marine Corps pin in the lapel.
“I can feel his heart in there,” Rebekah said by Vanessa’s account. “Is he going to wake up?”
“No, he’s gone to heaven,” her mother, Julie, replied. “This is just his body.”
Rebekah set the rose in the coffin and stepped away. The older children would be coming later. And on Friday, there would be a wake for all those who mourn him. He will be buried sometime in the near future at Arlington National Cemetery.
On April 27, Rebekah will turn six. A moment when she was 5 has been preserved by a picture taken on a morning at the start of the school year when a sunny, cloudless sky matched her spirits. The photo shows Sully walking Rebekah to her first day of kindergarten, her tiny left hand in his warrior’s right as they ambled down the sun-splashed sidewalk.
The beard had been a symbol of a retirement in which Sully would be able to enjoy family moments with Julie and their seven children such as he had too often missed during nearly a quarter-century of service. Sully began walking Rebekah to and from school each day. And he escorted her to dance class on Saturday mornings, always taking the same chair.
Then, in January, Julie and Sully fell ill with COVID. She quickly recovered but he had difficulty shaking it. And on Saturday, March 12, he felt too sick to take Rebekah to dance. He went instead to the medical center at Camp Lejeune, near their home.
As The Daily Beast has reported, Sully was flown from there by air ambulance to the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill. He was there placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, with the hope he would become fit enough for a double lung transplant.
Sully had seemed almost there when he developed a lung infection and gastrointestinal bleeding. He and Julie remained determined to get him well and back home. Julie got a video on her phone showing Rebekah in a pharmacy near their home with a Band-Aid on her right upper arm. A neighbor had just taken her to get a pediatric dose of the COVID vaccine.
But after The Daily Beast’s report on Sully and his family, things began to unravel despite numerous procedures and various surgeries. His gallbladder was removed along with a large section of his stomach and part of his small intestine. He continued bleeding.
“He was starting to ooze/bleed from pretty much everywhere,” Julie wrote on April 3 in a Prayers for Sully post on Facebook.
Sully was sedated, then eased back toward consciousness only for his blood pressure to spike so that he required further sedation. But he proved that his protector’s spirit was intact, that despite all his suffering, his primary concern was for Julie.
“As I held his hand, he was actually rubbing the back of my hand with his thumb as to comfort me,” Julie reported.
He battled on through April 5.
“He’s so strong! Still fighting/cheating death,” July marveled in the post.
The doctors tried everything, but nothing seemed to help.
“Just more of the same from the last several days… no big change,” she reported on April 6. “We need the big win!! Calling on God for a miracle.”
Later that day, Julie made a brief visit home. She took Rebekah to an after-school dance and afterwards read a bedtime story to her youngest child, 3-year-old Russell.
She then returned to the hotel near the hospital where she had been sleeping. She figured she would need some rest no matter what the next day brought.
“I woke up 2 hours later with a jolt of adrenaline so I called [the hospital],” she wrote. “They said he was fine... I fell back asleep 30 mins and sat straight up again. So, I came over here about 4 this morning and put that hog’s tooth where it belonged, in Andy's hand.”
A “hog’s tooth” is a bullet that a Marine sniper puts around his neck upon becoming a fully trained Hunter of Gunmen (HOG). Sully still had his in his left hand when he died just after 9:30 am. Julie was of course at his side and the hospital staff accorded her time alone with him.
“They were really respectful and gave her that room for hours afterwards to continue to hold him,” Krunich told The Daily Beast. “She held him until he went cold. She said she couldn’t leave while he was still warm.”
Julie announced the loss on her blog.
“I have to share the devastating news that my husband, our Sully passed away peacefully in my arms this morning… he fought valiantly, as always. I know the only way we will all get through this is together… so, I need you all. Right now, I have a supernatural peace and I believe he’s still comforting and fighting for me… I love you all.”
She added, “As part of our vows, Andy promised to never stop fighting for me.”
Julie then had to tell the children that Sully would not be coming home. Rebekah began looking heavenward for her daddy, seeing him smiling from the clouds and the stars.
Julie now wore Sully’s hog’s tooth. An apple tree that he had planted in the yard had begun to blossom with the arrival of spring. The dance school put red roses and a sign on the chair where Sully always sat when he walked Rebekah to class.
“This seat is reserved for MSgt. Andrew Sullivan,” it read.
Along with taking Rebekah to dance school, Sully had planned to continue his own education. He had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and figured on getting a master’s. He could then provide mental health counseling to members of the military and their families.
No doubt some of those who arrive at the wake beginning at 1 p.m. Friday will expect to see the ultimate Marine’s Marine laid out in his uniform. He will instead be dressed just as he was when brave and loving Rebekah peered in the coffin the day before; in his best suit so as not to shave a symbol of what was to have been a richly deserved new life.
“He was very proud of his retirement beard,” Krunich said.
The wake is scheduled to end at 4 p.m. and the weather forecast for Jacksonville says there will be clouds in the late afternoon sky.